eBay Lights Up With Rare NES Games in Wake of World Championship Interest

Late last week, you might recall a dinged-up copy of the elusive NES Nintendo World Championships cartridge raking in high bid after high bid on eBay. It would seem the success of that less-than-perfect copy has caused some uproar in the retro gaming community, and more sellers have cropped up in the hopes of earning big bucks for one of the rarest games in the world.

Multiple copies of both the grey and gold World Championship cartridge appeared on the auction site, drawing interest from buyers almost instantaneously. While the beat-up copy from last week is still awaiting a proper buyer at it's $99,000 closing bid, a better version managed to move for "just" $17,500.

Ars Technica reported that much of the widespread press coverage of other Nintendo World Championship games being sold for Scrooge McDuck-levels of currency has led to collectors and fanatics trying to rake these rarities into their collections before they fade into the sunset. In particular, only 26 gold editions of the NWC cartridge were made in existence. Sure, it's probably the same material as The Legend of Zelda cartridge, but still, it's uber rare. The gold editions of the NWC were distributed by 'Nintendo Power' for a mail-in contest held exclusive to the magazine and were never used in the actual world championships held by Nintendo in 1990.

The gold edition currently up for auction has already reached six figures, though it's unlikely to go through due to the low buyer rating of the bidder. That said, there are a handful of bidders right behind the top spot with bids that are nearly as ludicrously high. The buyer experience and purchasing histories of those sequential bidders make it ever-so likely that this golden NWC game will be sold for over $100,000. Well, at least free shipping is included.

As for the games themselves, the NWC cartridges contained three mini-games that were meant to tally up and compare scores of all the players in the tournament. The games on the NWC cartridges were Rad Racer, Super Mario Bros. and Tetris.

With over one week left to go before the auction for the cartridge expires, we can only guess at how high this will go. For now, you can keep up with the auction here, just don't blame us if you decide to bid just to find out the game was an actual clunker.